America’s God

Hauerwas is, I think, the most culturally aware theologian. Most thinkers, especially Protestant ones, could never make this kind of a statement: ” …America is the exemplification of a constructive Protestant social imagination.” Most religious thinkers in our time are either, so consumed in their shaping the ethereal they have lost the physical, or focus on hot button issues. In both cases there is an entire absence of historical grounding. This lack of historical grounding, in my opinion, creates a serious lack of grounding in reality.

Of course, Hauerwas is right. American Protestantism had no instituted and bulwarked Catholicism to guard against compared to Europe. Moreover, the lack of any sacramental influence creates the focus on the ethereal we see so often in American Protestant theology.

American Protestants do not have to believe in God because they believe in belief. That is why we have never been able to produce interesting atheists in America. The god most American say they believe in just is not interesting enough to deny. Thus the only kind of atheism that counts in America is to call into question the proposition that everyone has a right to life, liberty, and happiness.

That is a scathing denouncement of American theologians and churches. As we so often here, they don’t stand up for anything except the right to life, liberty, and happiness. It is strange to hear freedom being talked about in churches. It sounds exactly like how we use freedom in political conversation. I can’t, for the life of me, figure out why. I almost never use the word freedom. I do use the word ‘free’. But, I use it in a much different way, the opposite of being bound – always with an inward referent. Hauerwas’ comment also explains why religious pushback against pro-choicers is so large. Their vitriol is based against the right-to-life, so they must be non-believers, heathens, pagans, backwards, and un-American.

I could go on forever in this essay finding connections. But one more stuck out to me, and it has to do with Larry Lessig’s recent TED presentation:

Tocqueville descriptively confirmed the normative point made in the Massachusetts Constitution: “I do not know if all Americans have faith in their religion — for who can read to the bottom of hearts? — but I am sure that they believe it necessary to the maintenance of republican institutions. This opinion does not belong only to one class of citizens or to one party, but to the entire nation; one finds it in all ranks” (Noll, 10)

The loss of this maintenance of institutions is bad thing (note: republican there does not mean right-wing Republican, think publican, citizen, not political preference). Society’s loss of citizen institutions will cripple it by creating – even more – vast swarms of individualism with no common ground or experience. Like species on the Galapagos being separated so long they can no longer reproduce: only here we’re talking about the reproduction and mutation of ideas. The lack of common DNA (common experience) stamps out the ability to relate. With no citizen groups to demand their ability to re-use their ideas the only interested groups left are corporations backed with money. And the populace loses their ability to live creatively in the world. If the world, however, is going to throw away their institutions – as it seems they are doing – perhaps the Church has a chance to step up. That is of course if churches don’t blow it. They have to realize what is happening as well. Lessig puts his finger right on all of this when he talks about how republicans understand “church” as a concept where things and rights are given away.

It all depends on if churches remember their God to be the God of the entire world. Not the god of their nation idealized in individualistic democracy.